Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @01:10AM
from the free-hot-wings dept.

Elledan writes: Federal investigators in California have requested that BrightSource — owner of thermal solar plants — halt the construction of more (and bigger) plants until their impact on wildlife has been further investigated. "Unlike many other solar plants, the Ivanpah plant does not generate energy using photovoltaic solar panels. Instead, it has more than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door. Together, they cover 1,416 hectares. Each mirror collects and reflects solar rays, focusing and concentrating solar energy from their entire surfaces upward onto three boiler towers, each looming up to 40 stories high. The solar energy heats the water inside the towers to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes." The concentrated solar energy chars and incinerates the feathers of passing birds. BrightSource estimates about a thousand bird die this way every year, but an environmental group claims the real number is much higher.

anyway, seems like the environmental impact is quite less than mining of coal etc etc, and more easily solved....audible chirps, clicks, etc to scare the birds away? Or maybe a little metal eagle or hawk statue on the roof..

Or even: "BrightSource also is offering $1.8 million in compensation for anticipated bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.
The company is proposing the money for programs such as those to spay and neuter domestic cats, which a government study found kill over 1.4 billion birds a year."

Decreasing the number of birds killed in high population areas does not compensate for killing birds in a low population desert area. For example, raptors are attracted and killed because prey birds are attracted to the bugs which are attracted to the light. Very few raptors are killed by cats. Raptors are much more endangered than the song birds generally killed by cats. All birds are not equal.

I agree with your sentiment, but as someone who volunteers with raptor rehabilitation, I can speak from some experience. Actually more raptors than you might think are killed by cats. There are many raptor species which are quite small and easily taken by a cat. And of course all are vulnerable when in the nest or just after fledging, unable to fly or defend themselves. People always ask me if a raptor would take their pet cat, and I always tell them that the raptor is much more in danger from the cat than the other way around. Also there are many endangered songbirds (grassland species, neotropical migrants, etc), and many cats in both low and high population areas.

That all being said, the environmental impact of these supposed "green" energy sources is significant. The production of biofuels like ethanol has decimated habitat, the dangers of wind power to raptors are well known, and now this. There needs to be more study beforehand rather than after the fact. And green energy apologists need to concede that their industry is just as hypocritical about the environment as any other energy producer.

That 1416 ha. is the total size of the mirror fields, not the small focus area that kills birds. These top ten airports by area:http://www.toptenstip.com/top-... [toptenstip.com]are not only all much larger than the kill area at Ivanpah, but are located in heavily populated areas where there is a lot of water and birds. Ivanpah is located in the most featureless, unpopulated, wildlife-free area in the US.

I see a flaw in your logic. If it is a wildlife free area then there would be no birds to kill. Since there are birds being killed the area, while unpopulated by people, is not "wildlife free". A better description is "wildlife sparse" which makes killing a relatively small number of birds even more significant.

What I was trying to point out about airports was that the techniques target a different issue and may not work at the solar sites.

None of which are in desert conditions. The fact that there are more eagles in the North West does not mitigate the fact the there are fewer other raptors of other species in the desert. By your logic because there are millions of Spring Salmon we should be able to catch as many King Salmon (an endanger species) we want. Sorry but different species and populations.

Lots of things kill birds, and actually wind turbines are pretty low on the scale. Even nuclear plants kill more by some estimates:

Nuclear power is still likely bird-safer.

I don't want aggregate stats on total number of birds killed by different technologies.

I want Number of birds killed per hundred thousands of watts generated.
If all power plants were nuclear, then 100% of the birds killed in power generation would be by nuclear.
That doesn't mean that Nuclear plants are safer for birds than wind tur

I don't have figures for birds specifically handy, but I can tell you the best and worst for wildlife generally. Ignoring minor things like tidal power, the two best are geothermal and nuclear. It's too bad that geothermal is limited to certain geological areas, because it's pretty good on all measures. It releases some greenhouse gases and often requires fracking, but it's pretty safe for wildlife and generally a good idea. Nuclear is quite clean, except of course on the two instances of a major accident.

The worst for wildlife are coal and hydroelectric dams. Hydro surprises some people, but in the best case a dam starts outby destroying a large swath of habitat, then permanently disrupts fish migration and the ecosystems dependant on the waterway. In the worst case, Banqiao. The Banqiao hydroelectric dam disaster was far, far worse than any nuclear accident ever has been.

Ps, International Rivers is a good place to start if you want to know more about the environmental damage done by dams, particularly large dams as used for hydroelectric power. They are advocates of course ; just as the ASPCA isn't objective about animals, International Rivers isn't objective about rivers. They advocate for what they believe is right, but each is a good source of information about their side of the side of the issue.

A bit more info.......Bird kills from conventional power plants, be they fossil or nuclear, are primarily due to cooling towers & water intakes, and for fossil, smokestacks and emissions. No bird kills from operating nuclear plants are related to radiological sources.

Chernobyl IS an operating plant. But the "operating" part is not what affected local animal life.But what mdsolar and his type forget is, Chernobyle is 1 incident. Fukushima 2. Over the life of all the nuclear plants, even taking those 2 horrible accidents (preventable they may have been) the track record world wide for Nuclear energy is better than most other types of energy.

For reference, a skyscraper is expected to kill 24 birds a year [washingtonpost.com]. Quite a bit less than the 1000 per solar collector, but it turns out to be a rather large number as we have quite a few skyscrapers.

"Birds can fly into the rotors. Then they have to send the janitor Steve out to clean the thing, and it just ruins his day. Then he goes home and beats his kids. So if you support wind energy, you support domestic violence [bash.org]."

Last of the bald eagles? I wish. Come up to Alaska. They're basically giant rats that make more noise than rats ever did and poop in places that rats can only dream of. We have an buttload of the them. You're welcome to any and all.

You need to dig (pun intended) into the subject a bit more. The subduction zone of a tectonic plate might be 50 kilometers down, not 50 meters. People have suggested putting nuclear waste in some of the deeper ocean trenches formed by subduction zones where the plate boundary is thin ( 1 - 10 km). Problem is it would take tens of thousands of years for the material to subduct appreciably below the surface. In the meantime it would be actively falling apart just like everything else in a marine environme

I think it's funny that BrightSource's bird kill numbers are being trusted when they say 1,000 per year. This story [abc22now.com] says that "federal wildlife investigators" are estimating one "streamer" every two minutes on average. That would be 240 per day assuming 8 hours of operation. The Center for Biological Diversity estimates 28,000 per year. That's only about 76 per day.

The Exxon Valdez spill killed (from my quick search) an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 birds, about what this would kill in 10 years or so at mid-20k birds killed per year. So, build 10 of these plants (or larger with even more roasting capacity) and you have the equivalent (in bird deaths) of an Exxon Valdez oil spill each year. A wise sage once said "It's not easy being green."

If this were a coal or oil source quoting bird kills, would people be so willing to accept their numbers at face value? BrightSource is wanting to build a much larger plant right in a migratory corridor. They have a strong incentive to lie about the numbers.

Also, if you want to compare birds killed here to birds killed by "dirty" energy, scale this ONE complex's Kill per Megawatt up from its (planned) capacity of 392 MW to that of what you're comparing to. Assuming that the plant generates power 8 hours per day year round at 100%, you get about 3.2 GWh of electricity. A search found that for 2010 in the US coal power production was a bit larger than that at 1,994,000 GWh. So, multiply the bird kills by over 600,000 (1,994,000 / 3.2) and you can now compare the kills scaled for power generated. That would be scaling to over 600 million birds by BrightSource numbers and about 17 billion by the environmental group's numbers. The "federal wildlife investigator's" numbers would yield somewhere around 53 billion. I wonder how much coal could be saved by just burning 53 billion birds each year instead...

Don't forget to add in the tortoise habit that was damaged to build this too. I'm trying to think of the name of the thin, extremely fragile layer of crust on undisturbed desert ground that environmental groups want to shut down land so people won't walk on it. (It isn't Desert Varnish. That's what's on rocks.) It takes forever for it to recover. All gone on that six-and-a-quarter square mile site.

I'm trying to think of the name of the thin, extremely fragile layer of crust on undisturbed desert ground that environmental groups want to shut down land so people won't walk on it.

That's cryptobiotic soil, I think. Worth preserving, but I think we can stand to lose a few square miles of it in exchange for power for 100k+ homes. This isn't random people walking or driving over it for a moment and then leaving, this is permanently putting a piece of desert to useful work.

The Exxon Valdez spill killed (from my quick search) an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 birds, about what this would kill in 10 years or so at mid-20k birds killed per year. So, build 10 of these plants (or larger with even more roasting capacity) and you have the equivalent (in bird deaths) of an Exxon Valdez oil spill each year. A wise sage once said "It's not easy being green."

The Exxon Valdez is something which should not have happened at all. Whereas this is a consequence of "normal operation".

If we estimate only perfect performance, then we fail to acknowledge that we live in an imperfect world. Spills are normal consequences of oil operations. It's not whether or not they *should* happen, but rather how often they *do* happen that matters.

Considering the number of birds killed every day from common human activity such as driving cars, flying planes, discarding certain trash, its hard to think a few birds killed by windmills or a concentrated solar power (CSP) should be a concern. Not that they shouldn't take practical steps to minimize it.

CSP is a neat technology, but far behind Solar PV and wind in being ready for practical applications, so it will likely remain a quite small part of the energy mix if/when it gets out of the pilot phase.

CSP development is however, a really interesting to follow. It involves a range of challenges that cross engineering and material science disciplines that aren't obvious when you think "its just generating steam with mirrors". But, in reality, it is really hard to obtain the steady heat input and control needed to obtain steady, quality steam. There are numerous trade-offs between heat absorbing coatings, their adhesive techniques and their ability to expand and contract frequently. There is a challenge in designing the right turbine which operates efficiently as possible over a wide operating curve. Central "boiler" tank type designs have very slow heating / cooling times, which helps dampen solar variances, but make it difficult to place turbine cycle equipment nearby in a way that doesn't impact the heating approach. The linear Fresnel mirror/tube type CSP plants on the other hand have big problems in maintaining even heating throughout the long tubes which leads to hammer and damage, and a lot of expansion/contraction related issues. I'd love to work on one of these projects, its worth reading about if that kind of thing gives you a rise.

I thought the same thing but a brief skim of their donor list indicates otherwise, an easy to find annual report is also not something commonly available for the myriad of FF front groups.

Having said that, the last line of the summary is oddly misleading, the phrase "but an environmental group claims" should read "but federal wildlife officers claim". It was the Feds who observed "a streamer every 2min", which by simple linear extrapolation is ~25k/yr, they became alarmed and requested the construction halt. Notice they have not called for a halt to operations. I think a closer look is certainly warranted and Federal Wildlife people would appear to be the appropriate group to be doing the looking. Where the environmental group actually fit into the story I'm not sure, if they were the ones who called in the feds, then good on 'em for not turning a blind eye to a politically inconvenient truth.

Disclaimer: Self confessed "greenie" long before greenpeace and science parted ways in the 80's.

It's the call to immediately stop construction, rather than "design a way of scaring off birds" that fingers this as the usual Green misanthropy. They identify problems with every technology out there, but never support approaches to actually solving them.

One thing all Environmentalists have in common is the loathing of humans and their "impact" on the environment. A close second is Self Loathing, but not no much that they will volunteer to go first in an effort to reduce the human impact on the environment.

What a steaming pile of shit. There may be a few extremists who tend to get headlines that feel that way but most environmentalists like me just recognize how utterly dependent our human civilization is on the natural systems that sustain us and feel that we should take steps to help keep those systems going.

Just because you think something it doesn't become true. There are fanatics that think like that, sure. But one doesn't select an extremist group and try to paint them as the average - that is the way of shills and retards.

Most environmentalists are those that realize we live in a world with finite resources and that our children will indeed inherit the earth as we leave it.

I'll buy your number for cats - there are hundreds of millions of them, and they love to hunt birds. A power plant that kills a few thousand is completely irrelevant in comparison, but these are clueless "progressive" types, they aren't expected to understand basic math.

Crunching the numbers, it's foolish to delay solar power adoption for even 28K birds a year.

That's 28,000 birds for this current, small, solar installation: 0.4GWh, when the US uses tends of thousands of GWh. Scale it up to just 1% of US power generation and you'll be talking about millions of birds a year. It may well be that it is the least harmful way of generating electricity, but just saying cats kill more (which is an issue in itself!) doesn't make it unimportant. Personally I think it's very importan

Cats killing birds is not an issue. Those little ground finches? The sparrows? They're prolific. They climb into other birds's nests and destroy eggs. They kill small birds. They're vicious, hateful little bastards, and they're extincting the native species of the United States.

95% of birds I see are sparrows now. They're ground-foraging. We need more cats.

Actually, to be more precise, the Mother Jones bird kill article fails on almost all fronts of science.

1) starts with the presumption that all changes in bird population are due to Fukushima accident, but makes zero attempts to justify that logic, its basis, or evidence to support that theory.
2) ignores completely the habitat impact of the tsunami
3) ignores completely the impact of human evacuation. No bird feeders, no bird baths, no trash (common food source), no fish cleaning, etc.
4) states that it

Chickens can definitely fly. I've seen them fly on many occasions. Sure they're nowhere near as good as a seagull or an unladen swallow, they can get off the ground and fly short distances. This is why chickens are either kept indoors or have their wings clipped (and now you know where the expression comes from), as otherwise they'd fly out of their pen.

We have those ultrasound acoustic weapons - highly directional noise projectors. Presumably the volume of wildlife isn't very high, so you could watch the sky with a camera and then direct some sound which they treat as "fly away from" at any birds which crossed over a safe zone. Most nearby wildlife would quickly figure out where not to go.

CSPs can get over 1000 F. I've seen them direct mirror to a single spot in the air, and that spot lights you. Looks like a floats 'ball' of light. It does that because it's super heating the dust particle.

I use to drive by on fairly regularly when I live in Ca. One day I just drove in and talk to some people about it. They were very knowledgeable and nice

Except fish are slimy, scaly and make weird mouth shapes when you pull them out of the water to look at them. They look pretty awkward.

Birds on the other hand, are beautiful creatures flying through the air, truly, beautiful, feathered friends, God's own creations.

But if 3 birds die in a 3500 acre site per day, heaven help us all for destroying nature. I can go out in my back yard and shake the six to eight trees on my half-acre and watch at least four birds fly out.

Three humans die each day due to obesity-related health reasons within 3500 of the McDonalds by my house. They say humans are attracted to the site by the brightly-lit golden arches which some say is a food source for the species.

I question the logic a bit.1. We are talking about the desert where birds are more scarce that forested areas.2. This is only one plant. What happens when there are 100 or 1,000 such plants?3. Just because there are worse problem does not mean that we should ignore lesser problem.

1. Solar Thermal plants are built in the desert because that's where they have the most ideal operating conditions. The fact that there are more birds in forests than deserts is completely irrelevant because they don't build concentrating solar plants in forests.

2. We would expect the casualties to scale roughly with the number of plants, so is you had 1,000 such plants, that would be 1,000x the casualties. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of birds killed by feral cats every year in North

Except for example Israel is quite keen on solar power give that it is hot and sunny there to the point where they have deserts. Also not relying on hostile neighbours for fossil fuel is seen as being a "good" thing.

The suggestion is that Israel could meet all it's power generation using solar in the Negev. Heck the Tesla S almost has the range to drive from any point to any other point in the country. Given the hostile nature of it's neighbours, that they control much of th

According to Science News, anywhere from 365 million to 990 million birds die each year in the United States from crashing in to windows. Science News also reports studies that show 1.3 to 4 Billion birds die each year in the US because of cats. Compared to those numbers, power generation facility deaths are not even a blip.

Most glazed windows are in areas of high bird populations. Birds and people like similar environments. Deserts where these plants are located have much lower bird populations and much rarer birds. Raw numbers are meaningless. It is proportion of population that matters.

Smaller but not insignificant. If 28,000 birds are dieing to generate 0.4GWh then millions would die just to generate 1% of America's energy needs. Personally I can't understand why it's ok to own cats and negligently allow them to hunt but apparently society is fine with that, but it doesn't mean that we should ignore other issues because we're doing that wrong.

Actually no, Society is not OK with that. Only the most horrible pet owners let their cats out like that. It's the scumbag fringe of society that is OK with it.Many cities are trying hard to fight the scourge of bad pet owners letting their cats out.

Solar to heat to mechanical to electricity as already reached its maximum efficiency.

Photovoltaic has still many recent discoveries for great efficiency improvements, and more are likely to come.

Using heat for conversion is degrading the energy to its worst and less usable form, direct conversion is the way to go. Halting those heat projects is good news.

The big advantage heat-conversion plants have is that you can heat slow cooling material such as salt which can continue production electricity long after the sun has set, effectively turning it into a electricity storage medium. The big problem large scale use of Photovoltaic has, is that we do not have a cheap and scalable way to store generated electricity for use when needed, not just when the sun is shining.

Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun.

There are actual, serious, plans to put solar in orbit. Solar isn't limited to the surface of the planet.

But let's ignore that power-in-sky thinking for a moment.The amount of sunlight that hits the Earth is an astronomical 150,000,000,000,000,000 Watts.That's around 1000 times man's total energy usage.

To put it in per capita terms;At noon, 1 square meter on the surface receives about 1 kilowatt of energy.The average over a day is 4 kilowatt hours per square meter.A typical home is 100 square meters, and uses 24 kilowatt hours a day.At 12% efficiency, you only need to cover half the roof with photovoltaics to supply 100% of that homes electric needs.

Many scientific discoveries are done by accident. This is simply one of them: a new solar powered weapon against birds. They should install one in the big city squares instead of the desert to solve the problems with pigeons.